Basilica De La Sagrada Familia , Barcelona |
Becoming adult
is indeed a daunting task. As a parent, I tell my children they can do what
they want if they have the resolve
and convictions to follow through what is on their wish list. Often in chasing
what we feel will make us happy and fulfilled, we lose sight of engaging
ourselves in moments that actually matter . Growing up does not mean renouncing
your hopes and dreams, growing up means trying to make sense of the world,
living with uncertainties and making the best of what you have and what you can
do.
Growing up needs
courage because it means being
responsible for yourself, learning to trust your own judgment, taking responsibility for your actions
and omissions.We must make sensible choices that work for us by knowing our
strengths and weaknesses but how do we know by thinking rationally and acting
sensibly , we are not limiting ourselves? Growing up means finding a place in
the world and not losing yourself
despite experiencing unfair treatments and acknowledging the presence of
injustice around the world.
‘You have probably forgotten
the details of your first unfairness, presumably because it happened very
early, and was followed by many more. Still Barrie is probably right to say no
one ever gets over it, and the reason Peter Pan remains an eternal child is
that each succeeding unfairness is a surprise. None is ever internalized, so
his trust in the world remains unscathed.
Not so for the rest of us;
Peter Pan is a fairy tale. Even babies, as we’ll see, sense and suffer from a
world that doesn’t fit. It’s the beginning of alienation , but also of
indignation that, if properly guided, will be needed to make a life active.
What guidance is proper? We want our children to see as little suffering as
possible, and we know that even Buddha’s royal father couldn’t shield him. Most
of us have considerably fewer resources than he did. When my own son was eleven or twelve he came home from
school complaining that a teacher had treated him unfairly, and hearing the
details I thought he was right. Here’s what I told him : This won’t be the
last time that someone in power treats you unfairly. They may be threatened or
jealous or simply tired, they may prefer the kid or the employee who flatters
or falls. Besides reading and writing and arithmetic, one of the things you
need to learn in school is how to live with that – without losing yourself. Was the balance right? After too many encounters
with unfairness I could not share his outrage. We want our children to remain
awake to injustice; we just don’t want them to be undone by it. I was rather
pleased with my little speech; it was certainly better than anything I’d heard
as a child, when my own parents’ refusal to acknowledge that a teacher might be
anything less than benign left me not only alone with my indignation but deeply
confused: weren’t
they just saying the is is the ought ? But the problem is one of
proportion.’
Growing up means
having to interact and deal with people who are different from us. Growing up
means knowing how to manage one’s expectations and emotions. Growing up means
being tolerant of others and embracing all our differences and failings.
Ideally, growing up leads to better judgments. Growing up is simply about
thinking for ourselves. But it does not mean you have to give up striving for what you think is the
ideal world.
Susan Neiman also writes,
Susan Neiman also writes,
‘Growing up is a process of
sifting through your parents’ choices about everything: the music you couldn’t
help hearing because it was playing on a stereo you couldn’t reach, the
religion you couldn’t help believing because you were taken to sermons, or
holidays in a car you couldn’t drive, the neighbourhood they set up home in, or
move to when they changed jobs, and a host of general values you will not even
recognize as values until you are old enough to get out in the world and
encounter other ones. Sometimes when you’re sifting, with any luck at all,
you’ll be able to say and thank your parents for it one way or another, if only
by living in a way that proves them right. On the other hand, if you don’t
reject any of their choices you are not grown-up-if only because their choices were
made in a time that isn’t this one, and not all of them fit into the world you
now inhabit.’
Why Grow Up does not
tell you how but why it is necessary to grow up for coming of age itself is an
ideal one should strive for. Susan
Neiman shares her thoughts about aging and the need to build a new
model of maturity in the 21st century from reading disparately and
widely and in her book , she
discusses works by philosophers namely
Immanuel Kant, Jean- Jacques Rousseau and Simone de Beauvoir.
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